Reviews
Dylan Moore
Ever since the Polish photographer Maciej Dakowicz documented the debauchery of South Wales nightlife in a series called Cardiff at Night, there has been a kind of perverse glamour in images of scantily clad girls and young women falling down drunk whilst roaming gangs of check-shirted “roiders” look on gormlessly. Being as Swansea’s nightlife is, as depicted here, even “scruttier” – to use the evocative local parlance (think “slut” meets “scrubber” and you’ve got it) – than that of the capital, an artistic documentation of Swansea at Night was inevitable at some point. The surprise is in the Read more ...
bella.todd
From theatre viewed through peepholes and camera obscuras to a dance piece you watch across a wasteland while wearing headphones, this year the Brighton Festival and Brighton Festival Fringe seem to be fixated with ways of seeing. Hot on the heels of the premiere of dreamthinkspeak’s fishbowl Hamlet came a revival of Vanishing Point’s gorgeous Interior, in which we watched a wintry dinner party unfold wordlessly through the windows of the house. Inside, they ate, drank and danced, felt irritation and fondness, loneliness and love. Outside, polar bears prowled and a melancholy moon slowly Read more ...
geoff brown
I half expected to hear someone on the platform call out “Is there a doctor in the house?” For Mariss Jansons, principal conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and esteemed beyond measure, didn’t look well during this concert, the second in the orchestra’s current Barbican residency. Drained from his exertions during Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, he left the platform weary and grey. The following interval was seriously extended. The next piece, Strauss’s Metamorphosen, he didn’t conduct at all, leaving the 23 string players to wing it alone with a wink, a nod, and as many waves Read more ...
theartsdesk
My Bloody Valentine: Isn’t Anything, Loveless, EPs 1988-1991Kieron TylerEach of these three CDs is essential. My Bloody Valentine’s 1988 Isn’t Anything and 1991’s Loveless were era-defining albums that time has done nothing to tarnish. The EPs they released around then are just as indispensable. But the world of My Bloody Valentine is as mysterious as their noise. Reissues were originally scheduled in 2008 and promo copies sent out. But nothing hit the shops. After that, the band began being seen live again, while main man Kevin Shields also cropped up playing with former Creation label mates Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Brigham Young University in Utah is the largest private university in America, and is probably best known for its affiliation with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, AKA the Mormons. What’s less commonly known is that the university also has a choir (four different choirs, in fact) that is among the finest collegiate ensembles in the US. Rounding off their three-week tour of England and Wales, the mixed-voice BYU Singers last night offered the audience of St John Smith Square a lively guided tour through the history of American choral music, with just a little bit of God thrown Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bruckner: Symphony no 5 Lucerne Festival Orchestra/Claudio Abbado (Accentus DVD)This is a remarkable performance of a famously intractable work. You may think you can cope with the massive scale of Bruckner’s final three symphonies, but the Fifth always seems to me the most unwieldy. The gear shifts, the changes of dynamic from pianissimo to ear-splittingly loud seem more pronounced than ever. And the tunes are starker, less ingratiating. Claudio Abbado’s pacing, his shrewd handling of structure are rock solid, and he does make the piece sing, cohere in a way that I’ve not heard before. Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There have been some highly unlikely couplings in the long history of television comedy, but the one between Debbie from The Archers and Joey from Friends in the first series of Episodes ranked somewhere near the top of the list. If the viewers struggled to be convinced by that oddly implausible tryst, at least we weren’t alone. It turns out Tamsin Greig’s character Beverly Lincoln can’t quite believe it happened either.It is Bev’s bout of improbable (and – as it transpired – unjustified) revenge sex which is destined to hang like a smoggy sky over series two of Episodes, the Golden Globe- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The concept sounds like something dreamed up towards the bottom of a bottle in a Harare shebeen: Two Gentlemen of Verona performed by two gentlemen in Shona. But if any of the plays can withstand the stripped-down treatment, it’s the likeable but formulaic early comedy featuring a couple of chums who compete for the same girl. In this account, two actors undertook to perform all the roles with only a few bits of cloth and considerable acting chops to see them through. On a drizzly spring afternoon at the Globe, it was utterly delightful.Unlike the many shows travelling to London for Globe to Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Tim Burton is a man who has always been at home in the shadows. His is a world of demon barbers, headless horsemen, deformed sewer dwellers and corpse brides, of chalky complexions, dusky aesthetics and billowing fog. His films are designed to chill children, or bewitch big kids, they hark back to the Brothers Grimm and Hammer horror - not least in the recurring presence of avuncular abomination Christopher Lee. At his most creatively successful, with films such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Batman, Burton gives us anarchy, askew humour and misfits clad in black. And so it is that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Some things just don’t need saying. “If you know the chorus to this one, please join in” comes the invitation from the stage just before “Dreadlock Holiday”. On the final date of 10cc’s 40th anniversary tour it was unlikely that anyone at the Royal Albert Hall didn’t know the chorus. Actually, it’s unlikely that anyone, anywhere, doesn’t know the chorus.Many of 10cc’s songs are so well known, so ubiquitous, they’re like a magnolia paint job. But, boy they’re good. Last night strung “Wall Street Shuffle”, “The Things We Do for Love”, “Good Morning Judge”, I’m Mandy, Fly Me”, “Life Is a Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Street of dreams? The people who lived in the real-life inspiration and location for Coronation Street, Archie Street in Salford, hand-picked by the soap’s begetter Tony Warren, would be flummoxed and flabbergasted to hear it called that. I walked down Archie Street several times when the TV soap started. The two-up, two down, back-to-back terraced houses, separated by a three-foot alleyway, had no baths, no hot water, no inside lavatories and were dubbed “a disgrace to society”. But the people who lived in them when the TV version started on 9 December 1960 were genuine enough folk. One of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
From Caro at Chatsworth and now de Waal at Waddesdon, the grandest of the stately homes are invigorating their historic collections with seasonings of the contemporary. Like Chatsworth, Waddesdon also has a growing permanent collection of contemporary sculpture housed in its famous gardens, from Michael Craig-Martin to Richard Long, as well as a small group of Lucian Freud indoors, including a portrait of the current Lord Rothschild.The impulse is understandable: to enliven, enhance and underline the historically frozen displays. If the intellectual aesthetic framework complements and Read more ...